Episodes

You’ve heard of an open and shut case. That’s what the fifty- year history of full- fledged female participation in the military has given us. So why now is there any question that they have, and are fully capable, of playing any role they have been given the opportunity to advance to, including major ranks and positions in all the Armed Forces? To answer these perplexing questions is Eileen Isola, an editor of the new book, “Necessary Turbulence.” She graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy i...

Many say that AI will keep you from working because your skills can be replaced by this technology in ways that make it faster and cheaper for companies to accomplish the work. Well, here’s another way AI may affect your job. Have you heard about the resume robots? Many companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) that scan for hyper-specific keywords which are often pulled straight from the job description. These ATS systems can act as a digital filter replete with hidden biases that may sile...

There has been a lot of ink spilled trying to explain the climate weirdness which has spread all across the globe. And while some of the metrics may still be questioned, the near universal effects agreed upon by climate scientists and visible to the naked eye are upon us. So how well do we really understand what is happening and why? Pable Ribeiro Dias, Ph.D. in his new book “Climate Changed: The Science of Sustainability and How Each of Us Can Do Our Part,” is the primer and reference resource ...

The thirty-year history of the WNBA has been a raucous roller-coaster and controversy continues to swirl around the league, as it welcomes new teams, new revenue streams, greater audience interest and yet retains ongoing socio-political challenges based on sex, sexual orientation and color. It is fair to say that the league could not have achieved the status of the longest-running professional women’s sports league in US history without a certain cache that has been growing over the years. The l...

Many people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 were hoping that he could restore the economy back to levels before the pandemic and somehow bring inflation down. That hasn’t happened and affordability is hanging around the neck of Republicans like an albatross going into the mid- term elections. Still others wanted a tougher immigration policy, but no one bargained for citizens getting swept up in ICE raids and others getting gunned down like in Minneapolis, Houston and Maine. Another group thou...

Individually and collectively, the Beatles and Bob Dylan were the pulse, the heartbeat, and the cultural pacesetters of the 1960’s. They each influenced the course of popular music for generations, but until now, there hasn’t been a serious investigation into the ways their rivalry and collaboration affected the other. In his new book, “Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other–and the World,” Jim Windolf, features editor at the New York Times, does a deep dive ...

Carole King was always a great writer of pop melodies from the early days of Teen Pan Alley, at the Brill Building, in the heart of midtown Manhattan, when she and her then husband, Gerry Goffin, a lyricist, gave us classics like “Up on the Roof”, “Natural Woman,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “The Locomotion” and hundreds more. Her transformation in 1971 to a recording artist giving us one of the most successful albums in history, “Tapestry,” was something many who knew her might not ha...

We are all in the doom loop of what has become known as the ‘annoyance economy’. You know the drill–long hold times on calls and the ‘friendly’ AI assistant unwilling to get you to a human, hidden junk fees, voluminous spam offers, health insurance wrangling that pits you against health care giants, corporate-friendly cancellation processes that are designed to make you throw up your hands and pay the damn bill regardless of the validity of your claim, airline policies from ‘budget’ carriers tha...

Our guest has resurrected the word ‘instigators’ and given it a powerful and positive connotation. In this case, she is bringing attention the historical importance of Black women, ages 18 to 45, whose role continues to be that of pushing our society forward for social justice and historic reforms of all kinds. Atima Omara, author of “The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy and What We Can Learn from Them”, challenges us to consider any progressive movement–be ...

Google Trends reported a 2,400 percent increase in searches for “AI girlfriends” recently. Millions of people are currently in what they consider to be serious relationships with AI. Thousands have engaged in ceremonial weddings with their AI companions and stay as faithful to them as they would a human partner. Could legal marriage to AI be far off? To many of us such concepts are unusual to say the least. However, it’s hard not to see how so many in our society could take their screen addictio...

Most success stories start with an unimaginable backstory. Larry Bird’s journey to NBA immortality involved one of the most hardscrabble roads to success. In the fall of 1974, Bird-one of the greatest players ever to pick up a basketball-was lost and in danger of slipping away. This self-proclaimed ‘hick from French Link’ was recruited to play for Bobby Knight’s vaunted Indiana University Hoosiers’ team, but his discomfort with the fit at the University saw Bird never play a minute for the team....

You’ve heard the phrase ‘horse sense’ which generally means the ability to make good judgments or decisions. In other words, common sense, about which we have often been told isn’t all that common. Our guest today, Patrick Dorinson, has a lot of what I described earlier, and he lays it all out in his new book, “The Common Sense Cowboy’s Guide to Life: Stories from the Old Guy at the End of the Bar.” The book is a spirited read full of life lessons, based on his years working on ranch crews, winn...

There was a time when scientists could only read our biology, then came an advance with their ability to edit it and now it’s a moment to write a whole new chapter in evolution through synthetic biology, made possible in large part, you guessed it by artificial intelligence. Breakthroughs in AI, gene editing and synthetic biology are coming together to make this an unprecedented time in the history of life. Evolution, and its randomness, have left us with bodies that could benefit from our abili...

Recently, noted author Walter Isaacson devoted a whole book to what he called “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written”, you know, the one that reads ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” While the beauty of the prose in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is most often quoted, our guest historian and Professor of His...

In an unprecedented compilation, half of the faculty at Harvard Law School contributed essays, short and readable, about the work America has to do to build on the dreams and aspirations of our Founders as set out in our seminal documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Both of them commit our nation to shared governance, shared rights and shared accountability under the law for ‘one people’, as diverse as we were then and even more so today. Joining us on this podcast is ...

President Trump’s most prized word is ‘tariffs’ and on Liberation Day he extolled their virtues and told us that this would usher in a new era of reshoring and renewal of the manufacturing sector. He has also touted $18 trillion dollars in manufacturing investments here in the United States, but according to our guest that has yet to result in shovels in the ground. After a year of on again, off again tariffs and testy interplay with allies on many of the levies, is it having the desired effect ...

Underpinning the growing use of AI is the need for state-of-the-art data centers. These data centers host a large number of file servers and networking equipment that can store, process, and analyze text, images, code, and other information sources. While data centers have been around throughout the computer, internet and cloud eras none so big and controversial as these. One proposed in the state of Utah is larger than Manhattan. Really! The objection to these data centers has formed in red and...

Professor Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University, and the author of “Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate”, joins us today to discuss the three, five-alarm issues facing the globe: fighting climate change, saving democracy, and eradicating poverty. Assuming that there is generally global consensus that these issues are paramount, he believes that the outdated policies that focus on one of these issues alone worsens the trade-o...

If you’re like many people, their mood is sour about their station in life and that of our nation. It is a malaise, of sorts. You can tell that Americans are struggling to determine who they are, their role in the world and what life is all about. These are high order issues that people are struggling to address. They are going to therapy, meditating, buying books and wellness products and yet often the answers are elusive. Our guest, University of Chicago professor, J. Eric Oliver, has taught a...

Secretary of Defense (or ‘War’, as he prefers) Pete Hegseth is a poster child for the way military education likes to inculcate recruits and students into a macho culture of masculinity. The Pentagon has a vast educational network through which to teach these lessons. It includes basic training, service academies like West Point, JROTC, ROTC and dozens of military schools and war colleges. This has given the military brass outsized power in shaping our young men and, by extension, society at lar...

America’s First Amendment is a model of free speech protection unparalleled across the globe. Yet, the United States saw the third largest decline in free speech between 2021 and 2024. And 2024 marked the 19th consecutive year in which civil and political rights declined globally. While it may seem paradoxical that while the new voices who are speaking out on unregulated platforms seem to proliferate daily so are attempts to monitor, filter and block content. Or at least encouraging people with ...

The host of America Trends, Larry Rifkin, has in the later stages of life taken up keyboards and songwriting. He is putting out his third album of originals, in collaboration with Alasdair MacKenzie, as part of the music project he calls Rockaway. The album, titled “Wrong Side of Love”, contains 16 songs that still offer political and social messaging, as in the first two albums, but redirects much of its focus toward love–its textures, complications and quiet endurance. Jon Krofssik, the techni...

The pardon power that the President has is, as Constitutional prerogatives go, about as absolute as it can be. Coupled with the friendly majority Donald Trump has on the United States Supreme Court, which gave him immunity from prosecution for many crimes charged in connection with his pardons, and you have what some call a pardon-palooza going on in his second term. Most egregious to some, like this observer, was the blanket pardon of all those involved in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. ...

Deborah Schwartz, a healthcare attorney, saw how medical insurance companies put profit over patient and the impacts it had. While inside the health insurance industry, she tried to change the practices she saw which were antithetical to better health outcomes, but since leaving the field, she’s writing about in her new novel, “EmmaCare” and sounding the alarm about what she saw. By whatever measure, claim denials, coupled with prior authorizations and other practices, are growing and put the on...